Marketing

MarTech Wars: The one rogue element threatening the revolution

Like the Empire’s infamous Death Star, our marketing technology has a single point of failure that puts everything at risk.

Analytics help us better understand our customers and demonstrate the very real impact marketing has on the business. Automation tools allow us to reach thousands of unique segments in relevant places, at just the right time. However, without being fueled by a flow of original, high-quality personalized content, these tools would lie idle and useless.

This means that content creators face a relentless, crushing demand for new blog posts, images, web pages, emails, videos, infographics, presentations, e-books and more, every week, every day and even every hour. And the pressure is only getting more intense with 73% of companies planning to increase the volume of original content they create in the coming year.

Is the creative bottleneck MarTech’s single point of failure?

If your team’s best ideas get stalled because of miscommunications and approval delays or powerful creative work is watered down by endless reviews cutting into deadlines, your company’s growth is being stifled by a creative bottleneck.You’re not alone. 75% of marketers admit that they don’t have an effective creative development process and in a recent CMO Council study, CMO’s shared that the increasing demand for content “has revealed the cracks in the actual systems and foundations”.

The increased demand for content has only put additional strain on an already weak system and something’s gotta give. Creative teams are stressed out and disillusioned by too many late nights working on the latest revision. Even those leaders fortunate enough to have agencies and specialized freelancers at their disposal feel the strain of keeping these external parties on the same page as their internal teams.

It’s time to revolutionize the content supply chain

The time is ripe for marketers to take a fresh, new look at their tired, SSDD approach to content development and explore technologies that support the unique challenges of creative collaboration. As a leading industry analyst puts it:

“All that energy and investment you commit to automating digital experiences at scale may be for naught if you’ve failed to pay adequate attention to the content supply chain.”

36% of marketers and creative professionals don’t believe that technology can help. Like Han Solo and Jyn Erso, they feel that taking part in a revolution is their fate. But it is possible to improve your team’s creative process and break the bottleneck preventing you getting the most from your existing MarTech investment. Here are three places to start.MarTechWars-surveycrop1. Unite everyone in a single place

Multiple office locations, remote contractors, external agencies and far flung review and approvers mean that getting your entire collaboration team together in one physical room is just never going to happen. But you can use collaboration tools to share, discuss, update and review a range of creative assets in one place, which will keep your entire team on the same page.

2. Make it easy for reviewers

Reviewing creative work often involves a lot of tedious typing of emails just to describe what exactly what you’re talking about, never mind the specifics of the feedback itself. To speed up review cycles, make it easy for your reviewers to preview the landing page design, video, ad or image, and to leave their comments in context of the creative work.

3. Smooth the approval flow

Don’t let a program stall inexplicably at the finish line because of unambiguous approvals. Did that smiley emoji mean we’re good to go or that the reviewer likes the general direction? Getting the green light is critical, so make sure you have a clear and auditable way to identify the final approver.We all know what happened to the Death Star once the rebel forces got their hands on the blueprints that revealed its weak point. Don’t continue to let your marketing efforts be held hostage by the creative bottleneck threatening the effectiveness of your analytics and automation tools.

Now’s the time to bring a new hope to your creative team and use the force of powerful new creative collaboration tools to bring MarTech into a new age.

An amended version of this article originally appeared on MarTech Advisor.
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